


A Great Fountain

by kirazi



Series: Fountainverse [1]
Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, F/M, Fix-It, Idiots in Love, Post-Canon, Post-Disaster Reconstruction, infrastructure, lots of feelings, waterworks (in both the literal and figurative senses)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-26
Updated: 2019-07-28
Packaged: 2020-05-20 09:38:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 20,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19374076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kirazi/pseuds/kirazi
Summary: “What I want isn’t possible,” Jaime says, his throat aching. He can repair every broken place in this city before he’ll be able to fix what he’d just seen, torn and unmended, when he’d finally looked into the deep well of her eyes.(Jaime survives the collapse of the Red Keep, but it's going to take a long time to rebuild his life, and a number of other things that have been left in ruins.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is starting to feel like an unhealthy compulsion. "Ring Them Bells" is still (mostly) how their story ends for me, but apparently I'm writing yet another fix-it. This one leaves the show ending through 8x06 basically intact, with one major divergence: assume Euron drowned (because that fight scene was just too stupid to bear) and as a result Jaime is somewhat less perforated and manages to survive the collapse of the keep. Jaime POV throughout; rating is now M, thanks to chapter 8, but T for the rest.
> 
> Title is from Louise Glück's poem ["The Wild Iris"](https://kiraziwrites.tumblr.com/post/185870609962/from-the-center-of-my-life-came-a-great-fountain) because it's too fitting to ignore, under the circumstances.

Hell is full of seagulls. He ought to have expected that, he thinks. Their raucous screeching fills his ears, a dreadful cacophony, and the pain in his head worsens, impossibly so, until it annihilates him completely.

When he wakes, later, he understands two things: he’s alive, somehow, and in a boat. Jaime cracks his grit-clogged eyes open just enough to glimpse a sliver of night sky, constellations brilliant above, and then a voice speaking a language he can’t understand says something, as a hand dips a soaked cloth to his parched lips. _Let me die_ , he thinks, but he can’t form the words, and some animal part of him takes over instead, eagerly suckling the water from the rag, before everything goes dark again.

They must drug him, with poppy milk or something stronger, because for a long time he sees and hears nothing more, and his only company comes in the form of fragmented nightmares, a dim eternity spent inside the prison of his aching skull. When he starts to come back to himself, it happens slowly, piece by piece; he’s not in the open boat, anymore, but he’s still at sea, unless he’s just so dizzy that he’s mistaking the swells of motion beneath him for waves. It’s dark, but there are no stars, just a gloomy, enclosed space that might be a hold, and there’s a thin pallet under his back, through which he can feel the uneven wooden boards of the deck. His sister isn’t with him, so she must be dead, must have died when the keep collapsed onto them. For a time, that fact obliterates everything else, but when a calloused, gentle hand brushes his brow, checking to see if the fever’s receded, it’s not Cersei he thinks of. Jaime flinches from the memory of straw-pale hair, disarrayed on a pillow, and a searching blue gaze. He opens his eyes.

The hand doesn’t belong to a woman at all: the face that swims into vision above him is brown and weathered, and unmistakably male, given the short grizzled beard. The man smiles, revealing several missing teeth, and says something rapid and incomprehensible. Jaime shakes his head— _ow_ —and manages to utter a few hoarse syllables, at which the man’s face brightens in sudden understanding.

“Oho! You know not Valyrian speech?” he says, his accent heavy on the words of the common tongue.

Jaime struggles to recollect his childhood lessons. “A little,” he says, in what he _thinks_ is High Valyrian, and the fellow cackles. “You talk like priest. Not need, I know Westerosi speech also.”

The following conversation is somewhat garbled, but Jaime manages to glean the relevant details: he’s in the hands of a stray band of pirates, Essosi rather than Ironborn, who had latterly been attached to Euron Greyjoy’s fleet. Having made it ashore after the destruction of their ships, they’d located the skiff Tyrion had arranged, and decided to do a little spontaneous looting amid the rubble of the Red Keep before rowing away in it. They’d found him there, battered and unconscious, and taken him for one of their own number on account of the missing hand—he remembers, now, removing the gold one as he and Cersei fled, lest he be recognized again—and brought him away with the rest of their meagre spoils. He forces himself to ask if they’d found a woman near him in the ruins. “She dead,” comes the curt answer, and he closes his eyes, then. But the man won’t leave him alone.

“You Ironborn, then?” asks the pirate—his name is Yovik, apparently—after Jaime says no, he wasn’t on Ilarios’s ship, or Wohon’s, or Jemeyel’s. How many fucking foreign captains had that cunt Greyjoy recruited to his banner? No wonder the fleet had been so large, even after his niece took back the Iron Islands.

“Not a pirate,” he finally croaks, and Yovik looks puzzled.

“You been in many battles,” he says, gesturing at Jaime’s body, the obvious evidence of its decades of scars. “A sellsword? Before you lose hand?”

“A soldier,” Jaime tells him, and closes his eyes again. They’ve kept him alive because they thought he was one of them; gods know what they’ll do with him now that they know he’s not, and likely to be of no use to them besides—a badly injured man with no sword, and no hand fit to wield it.

They leave him in the Stepstones. Fucking pirates.


	2. Chapter 2

Maybe he should have pretended to be a pirate after all, Jaime thinks, when he realizes he’s going to be a slave instead.

Yovik and company put him ashore at a stronghold on one of the smaller islands in the Stepstones—someone helpfully informs him that its name translates as Halfskull, and he supposes it does look a bit like one, a ridged stone dome protruding from the sea, with a great socket-like hollow on the leeward side that harbors a tiny bay and a settlement carved into the rock above. Most of the month or so he passes there is spent flat on his back, slowly recuperating under the indifferent but competent care of its inhabitants, who cater to pirates and slavers in need of a place to take on fresh water and offload captives and unsatisfactory recruits.

By the time he’s able to walk again, his ears have mostly grown accustomed to the local dialect of Low Valyrian, although his tongue is slower to catch up. It doesn’t matter; he speaks as little as possible, and only to the old women who tend to the handful of captives that have arrived injured or fallen ill. When asked, he tells them his real name, but not all of it, and admits to a past as a soldier, some knowledge of how to fight (badly, with his left hand), and the ability to read and write (also badly) as well as do basic sums. It takes him longer than it should to understand that their questions are geared at assessing his potential value on the market. He wonders, idly, what it could be. His best days as a fighter are past him; he’s not fit for the galleys, not with a missing hand, nor for most kinds of manual labor; he’s educated, but too clumsy with the written word to make a promising scribe or bookkeeper, and not fluent enough to be a translator. At least he’s too old and too obviously maimed to get sold to a pillow-house, which is a relief, since he’s only ever fucked two women in his life, and no men at all, and has no interest in fucking anyone else. Thankfully, that doesn’t come up in the questioning.

When he’s finally herded back onto a ship, along with several other strays from the sickroom—not in chains, but effectively guarded by a menacing Tyroshi bastard with a large blade—he doesn’t bother to ask where they’re going. He can’t bring himself to care. It turns out to be Lys, when they’re ushered back on deck less than two days later: the famous harbor shining before them, dotted with striped galleys, just like in all the stories. Better than Tyrosh, Jaime figures.

After they disembark, he’s surprised to learn that he’s not being sent off to the slave markets with the others. Instead, the Tyroshi slaver marches him, alone, through the narrow streets of the waterfront, to a squat stone building. He hammers on the door with a meaty fist, and when a boy answers, he says, “Go fetch Arko. Got a delivery for him.”

Five minutes later, a stocky, middle-aged man—obviously not Lyseni, what with his black hair and golden skin and tattooed face—stomps out, takes one look at Jaime, and turns to the slaver, roaring. “Horhis, you cheating bastard, I told you I don’t need another failed pirate or broken soldier. You _owe_ me.”

“This one’s no common soldier,” the Tyroshi—Horhis, he supposes—responds, placid. “Must have been some kind of officer. Westerosi, but he understands Valyrian well enough. Halfskull Lyka says he can read and do sums, and knows fortifications and things. He’ll do for the debt.”

Arko glowers, looking unconvinced. “Name?” he asks, turning to Jaime, scanning his face and body with a calculating eye.

“Jaime,” he says, the first word he’s spoken since setting foot on land.

“Hmpf,” says Arko. “You work for me now.” He waves Horhis away—“Fuck off with yourself, you goddamned murdering whoreson”—and ushers Jaime inside, where it’s cooler, if somewhat dank and smelly. They arrive at a sizeable chamber, some kind of office, containing a number of shelves filled with scrolls and two large tables covered with a haphazard scatter of maps and diagrams, and here, Jaime is introduced to his new profession.

Arko, it turns out, is also a slave, originally from Volantis. But no man is his master—he’s owned by the city of Lys itself, and now, it seems, so is Jaime. “I’m in charge of the sewers,” he says—that explains the ambient smell—“and the iedarka.” The iedarka, he learns, is the city’s drinking-water system, a complex network of gravity-based canals and pipes and reservoirs. It transpires that one of Arko's deputies, another Tyroshi, had got into a knifefight with Horhis—over a woman, if Jaime’s understanding the rapid flow of his speech correctly—a few months back, and died of his wounds, so Arko had demanded a capable replacement. Which is him, apparently. Jaime attempts to explain, in his halting Valyrian, that he knows fuck-all about pipes or sewers, but Arko is unfazed.

“You can read a map?” he asks.

“Yes,” Jaime says, hesitant.

“Managed supplies, in the army, and planned defenses? Ever been in a siege?”

“Yes,” Jaime admits.

“Then you’ll learn. Who did you fight for, anyway, in your wars back home?”

“The losing side,” Jaime tells him, and doesn’t explain which one. Arko, who’s clearly inclined to garrulosity, takes a long look at his face, then, and doesn’t ask.

So that’s how he becomes a municipal slave of Lys, and, in time, a moderately competent aquificer. He can’t do much of the actual labor himself—“that’s not what you’re here for, you bloody fool,” Arko bellows—although he still spends enough time down in the sewers to get accustomed to the stink, eventually. Instead, he dispatches orders to the teams of slaves who do the repairs and construction; keeps track of the reports that come in from around the city alerting them to flooding, blockages, and insufficient flow; consults with the maesters called in to design new segments of the ever-expanding system. And it turns out that Arko—or Horhis, or Lyka back in Halfskull, or whichever capricious god has steered his path to this place—was _right_ : it’s not a bad fit. His military experience is generally applicable, here; if he’s not clever enough to plan an iedarka, he’s certainly capable of helping oversee the running of one. It’s mostly just a matter of keeping track of men and material, of spotting the signs of trouble as it emerges on the horizon, and knowing who to dispatch to deal with it before it blossoms into disaster.

In six months, he’s gained his footing. In a year, he’s on solid ground, confident of himself. And if Jaime doesn’t love this new life that’s found him, however improbably, he doesn’t hate it, either: it’s bearable. He’s useful. His body functions, the broken bones healed and the muscles gaining strength; he’s plagued by some lingering stiffness in the mornings, but that’s hardly unusual, at his age. His days are spent in the office he shares with Arko in the aquificers’ building. He wakes up, he eats, he works, he eats again, he sleeps. The cycle is pleasantly numbing, and as slavery goes, his is a relatively privileged sort: Arko may not be a free man, but he’s a powerful one, and his subordinates—even the lowest of them, the slaves who muck out the gutters and unblock the sewers—are fed well, and housed in decent, if spare, quarters. The magisters that govern Lys know who holds the fate of the city in their rough and dirty hands. They’re watched, closely, and any sign of dissent or conspiracy is harshly punished—slaves once poisoned the reservoirs, centuries ago, and it hasn’t been forgotten—but within the circumscribed boundaries of their existence, they live more comfortably than most who share their lot. They’re granted the occasional holiday, on certain feast-days and a few major religious festivals, and are permitted to visit the more plebian of the pillow-houses with whatever coin they might scrounge by doing odd jobs in their spare hours.

“You don’t fuck?” Arko asks, one evening, after Jaime’s refused yet another invitation to accompany him to his whorehouse of choice. “They have men, too, you know, if it’s getting fucked you prefer.”

“Not interested,” Jaime reminds him, wearily.

“If I hadn’t seen you without your trousers so many times”—there’s a spartan bathhouse in the aquificers’ building, since gods know they have frequent cause for washing—“I’d figure you must have had _it_ cut off, too,” Arko tells him, reprovingly. “It’s not healthy, man. You’ll be as backed up as the drains.” Jaime just scowls at him, so Arko shrugs and departs, leaving him to brood over the maps spread over the table before him. He’s trying to focus on an area near the Temple of Trade where the sewer conduits have recently developed a troublesome tendency towards blockages. It’s not really helping.

He has a lot of time to think, these days, now that the work has become familiar enough that it no longer requires his full attention. He doesn’t particularly enjoy it. Mostly, he thinks about Cersei. Sometimes about his father, or even the distant ghost of his mother, and sometimes about the children, but mostly about Cersei. He thinks about his dead, and he blocks out any thought of the living, barring them from the gates of his mind with iron determination, as resolutely as he’s ever guarded any fortress under his command. He can’t build the same barriers around his dreams, unfortunately, but he does his best to forget them as soon as he wakes. The work still helps on that front, at least.

At first, he’d thought about her in order to mourn her—because who else would?—and because he still missed her, despite everything. She’d been the strongest force in his life for more than three decades of it, and even once he’d started to withdraw, slowly and painfully, she’d remained a formidable one. Later, it becomes something more akin to a search for answers, for understanding, of the choices he’d made in his former life, and the reasons he’d made them. Loving Cersei the way he’d done had always been wrong—wrong in the eyes of the gods, wrong according to the laws of men and the laws of nature, no matter how many times she’d brought up the example of the Targaryens in their defense. He’d _known_ it was wrong, at least to everyone who wasn’t them, and built his whole life in defiance of that fact—so it’s only now that he finds himself wondering when it had become a different sort of wrong than it had been at the beginning. He’s not thinking about the countless times he’d gone to her bed, the way they’d deceived everyone around them, the children he’d fathered in another man’s name. He doesn’t feel guilty about Robert, not one single fucking bit, or about all the lies—he’s not sorry for protecting his sister, for comforting her the only way he could; he'll never regret the existence of their children. No. What he’s thinking about is another quality of offense: a boy falling from a tower window, a cousin’s skull shattered and bleeding into the mud, a sept exploding in green flame, a city burnt to ash. There’d been a time when all the wrongs had seemed to blur together, indistinguishable, woven into the firm cord of his love. Now he unpicks the strands, night after night, unable to stop himself. It doesn’t bring him any peace, much less any happiness, but he deserves neither of those things.

What peace he does manage to find comes from absorbing himself in the present: from doing the work well and efficiently, from the small pleasures of a spicy meal or a glass of wine—Arko’s generous with his supply, and glad to see there’s at least one vice that Jaime’s willing to partake in—or from appreciating the city itself, its clever buildings and fertile gardens and strange sights, in the rare moments he can steal on his way to and from the various locations that require an aquificer’s attention. He’s pleased with his growing fluency in Lysene Valyrian, and Arko starts to teach him the Volantene dialect as well, which is interesting, even if Arko’s notion of the essentials consists of highly specific technical vocabulary and a broad range of profanity. As the days keep passing, each distinguished from the last by nothing more than these minor diversions and the details of the work, it grows easier to think less about the past, to leave it on the other side of a sea he’ll never cross again.

And then, one bright afternoon, he strolls back into the office, fresh and damp from scrubbing off a long morning in the sewers, to seek out a diagram of the outfalls along the western harbor wall. It takes a while to unearth it from the pile, and he reminds himself to reiterate his suggestion of a more efficient filing system the next time Arko’s in his cups and inclined to be amenable.

When he looks up, there’s someone standing in the doorway, and his lost world crashes in on him. It’s Arya Stark, and every inch of her small body is taut with fury.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm guessing nobody put "Jaime becomes a civil engineer, water and sewers division" in their GoT endgame pool, but it's my story and I can do what I want, and I happen to be interested in municipal water infrastructure. I promise it will be relevant.
> 
> Also, for the record, "aquificer" is a made-up term—I had to call it something, and "engineer" doesn't seem to appear anywhere in the GoT vocabulary, but Roman water engineers and technicians were apparently called aquilices and aquarii. As for the iedarka, some online dictionary claims that the High Valyrian for water is iēdar, and what I'm envisioning is sort of a hybrid of the Roman aqueduct, the Umayyad-Iberian acequia, the Iranian qanat, and the Andean amunas.


	3. Chapter 3

Jaime is stunned at the sight of her. He can’t speak.

“You,” Arya says, glaring at him. “I should have guessed.”

“What,” he says, struggling to gather his scattered wits. “What are you doing here?”

“I was planning to sail to Sunspear next, and then on to the Sunset Sea,” she spits. “Now I suppose I’ll have to waste another month hauling _you_ back to King’s Landing.”

“No,” he says, more forcefully. “Leave me. There’s nothing for me there.”

Arya’s mouth is an angry red line, like a cut made by a sword. “Not as far as my brother is concerned,” she tells him.

“What does Jon Snow want with _me_?” he asks, his voice betraying something like bewildered despair.

“He’s not my brother,” Arya says, and while he’s still trying to make sense of that, she continues: “Bran told me to come to the aquificers’ building, when I got to Lys. We were planning to stop here anyway, to take on provisions, and see the city. Took me two hours searching up and down the waterfront to get here, because nobody in this damned town knows how to give directions. He said I’d find something here that I should return to its proper place.”

Jaime’s stomach sinks. “Why?”

“I don’t know.” She shrugs her shoulders. “He’s the king.”

His mind reels. He shakes his head, but Arya keeps going. “He said to tell the man I’d see that ‘there is an afterwards, and a debt that remains to be paid.’”

“I _can’t,_ ” Jaime says, almost begging now, and that’s when Arko shows up, red-faced and indignant to find his territory thus invaded. When Arya tells him—in excellent Low Valyrian, though her Braavosi accent is strong—what she’s come for, he starts roaring, and Jaime has to sit down on the stool before his knees give out completely.

“He’s not yours to take! He belongs to the city of Lys. I’m not losing another fucking aquificer, lady. It’s taken a whole fucking year to train him!”

“This man is of interest to the ruler of the Six Kingdoms,” she says, uncompromising. “The king's given me coin to buy his freedom. Enough to get yourself half a dozen slaves to replace him, and pay for their training as well.”

“The Six Kingdoms?” Jaime can’t help but ask, confused. Very little news from Westeros has reached him, here in Lys, although maybe that’s because he’s studiously avoided most chances to hear any. He knows Daenerys had leveled King’s Landing—he'd been there for that part—and he’d heard, back on Halfskull, that she’d died soon after, which meant Tyrion had most likely survived his treason. The only other person whose fate mattered to him had been safe in Winterfell, so he hadn’t cared, really, to learn what had happened to the throne, or to the rest of them all.

Arya spares an unfriendly glance in his direction. “Sansa is Queen in the North, now,” she informs him. Of course she is, Jaime thinks, dazed. Fucking Starks. Then Arya turns back to Arko, and hammers out her terms. The aquificer’s protests subside to a profane mutter once she actually produces the gold from her purse—he’ll be able to skim a tidy profit from the sum even after he’s done restaffing the office, Jaime knows—and he shoots Jaime a mournful look, then shrugs.

“I’ll miss you, man. You were better than the last one. But if a king wants you, he can fucking have you.” His eyes narrow, for a moment, and he looks back at Arya. “This king of yours isn’t planning to _kill_ him, is he?”

“No,” says Arya. “He’s not that kind of king.” More’s the pity, Jaime thinks to himself, as Arko nods, satisfied.

He stands, then. He doesn’t want to go. But Arya looks, furiously, like she has every intention of marching him aboard ship at swordpoint if he forces her to it, and if he does, she’ll win, and then whatever comes next is bound to get even more unpleasant than it already inevitably will be. Arko slaps his shoulder as he follows her to the door. “Gods speed you, you broody motherfucker!” he calls after Jaime's back.

“Wrong relative,” Arya hisses at his side, and he winces.

She marches him straight to the docks, to a ship flying a direwolf flag. Of course. Fucking Starks, he thinks, though his father and sister had been no better, stamping their stupid lions on everything: armor, gowns, towers. The hilt of a sword. _Fuck, fuck, fuck._

He doesn’t have much to say to Arya on their voyage back across the Narrow Sea, his sickening dread increasing with every league. She has a fair amount to say to him, though, as it turns out. She tells him who Jon Snow really is, and what he did and where he’s gone. She tells him that his little brother is Hand to the King, _again,_ and that Ser Brienne—her gaze narrows on him when she says the name—is Lord Commander of the Kingsguard. He could throw himself overboard, he supposes, but any other escape is pointless; Arya would track him down sooner or later, and send his brother a raven in the meantime. The truth would get out.

By the time they reach the outer waters of Blackwater Bay, his anxiety’s reached a crescendo, unbearable, and that’s when Arya finds him puking over the ship’s rail. He sinks back to his knees, after, holding on for balance, and she regards him, her head tilted to the side like a bird of prey's, and then sits down on the deck, cross-legged, a few feet away.

“You’re fucking terrified,” she says, like she’s only just working that out now.

Jaime draws the sleeve of his useless arm over his mouth, wiping away the spittle. His hand is still clutching the rail. “It’s better if they think I’m still dead,” he tells her, after a moment.

“But you weren’t dead,” she reminds him, and he closes his eyes. When he opens them, she’s still watching him, but with something that’s starting to look more like curiosity than scorn.

“I was in the city when it fell,” she says. “I went there to kill your sister. But the Red Keep got her instead.”

“It got me, too,” he tells her, and she nods.

“I figured as much,” she says. “Who pulled you out?”

“Pirates, some Essosi survivors from the Greyjoy fleet. They left me in the Stepstones, and I was sold to Lys once I could walk again.” He lets go of the rail, then, and lowers himself to the deck. His hand is shaking.

“Why did you go back to King’s Landing?” Arya asks, and it sounds like she’s actually interested in hearing the answer.

“It’s not easy to explain,” Jaime says.

“You may as well practice explaining it now,” she tells him, pointedly.

So—he does, or he tries to. It’s not easy. It’s a lot like puking up bile from an empty stomach, actually, although it gets a little less awful as he keeps on going. He can’t believe he’s talking about these things in the presence of this girl—she’s barely more than a child, although there’s nothing childish about her. And he knows she’s a killer, too. He’d seen her in action, a little, and heard rumors about much more.

“What happened to you, in Braavos?” he asks, eventually. He knows Arya must have studied swordplay there, not just Low Valyrian, given what he’s seen of her style. He’d noticed it when she was sparring, back in Winterfell. In the courtyard, with. With her. He flinches.

Arya doesn’t see it; she’s looking out over the waves. “I learned some things,” she says, finally. “About death. About myself. And then I went home, and put them to use.”

“I’m sorry for what happened to your family,” he says, his throat thick. “To your father. Sorry for my part in it. We were enemies then, but I never meant for him to die like that. I’d have tried to stop it, if I’d been there.”

She looks back at him, and gives him a slow nod. “The sword you brought to Winterfell, it was forged from Ice, wasn’t it.”

“Yes,” he tells her. He’d left it behind there, when he’d gone, taken an anonymous blade from the armory in its place. It had struck him as one small thing he could do right, amid everything wrong. “The other half of it is—it’s with her.” He still can’t say the name.

“You wielded it well, in the battle,” Arya says. “You both did.” There’s nothing Jaime can say to that.

“Why didn’t you kill me then?” he asks, instead. “If you were already planning to kill Cersei.”

“I would have, if I’d gotten to her and found you standing in my way.” She shrugs. “But you weren’t on my list. I had a chance already, you know. At the Twins, before I killed Lord Walder, and then all his sons.”

“That was you?” He’d wondered about that, once he’d realized what she was capable of; it had been one of the questions he’d used to occupy his mind on the frozen, awful ride back to King’s Landing.

Arya nods. “I watched you. I was wearing a different face, then,” she says, and his blood goes cold. “I listened to you talk. He disgusted you. You wanted to kill him, even though you knew you couldn’t. But I could.”

“Good riddance,” Jaime manages to say.

“I’m not sorry,” she says, and smiles, suddenly, though it’s no less chilling than the expression it replaces. “And I’m not sorry for letting you live. Because you fought with us in Winterfell, whatever you chose to do afterwards. And because Bran wants you back.”

“What does he want me for?” Jaime asks, though she’s already told him she has no idea.

Arya sighs. “I don’t understand him, what he is now. I don’t think anybody does. But if he wants you, there’s a reason for it, and it’s not to torment you, or take revenge. He doesn’t care about that sort of thing. He has some purpose for you, and he knows you can fulfill it, even if you don’t. He wouldn’t have had me fetch you otherwise.”

She stands, dusting off her breeches. “You should eat,” she tells him, before she goes. “You’ll need your strength when we arrive.”

He's able to choke down some bread and cheese that evening, feeling a little bit steadier, somehow. They’ll make harbor in the morning, and he knows Tyrion is expecting him; Arya had sent a raven from Sharp Point when they’d stopped for fresh water. He doesn’t think he'll be able to sleep, so he keeps replaying their conversation in his mind, lying there in his bunk—and he must drop off at some point, because when he wakes, he can hear the cries of gulls and the noise of the docks in the distance.

Arya sends one of her crewmen to trim his hair and beard before the ship drops anchor, but she gives him a dark cloak for disguise when she brings him ashore. With the hood up, his vision is blinkered, but he can see enough to recognize that the harbor has mostly been restored to its function, the signs of recent construction evident: fresh-smelling wood, unweathered stone, no traces of rust on the iron rings and bollards. He doesn’t see as much of the city, just a few glimpses through the broken walls, but he can hear hammering, and the sounds of carts drawn by oxen and horses, heavy with supplies. He’s surprised by how much of the Red Keep is still intact, when it comes into view—in the catacombs, it had felt like the whole bloody thing had come crashing down. The Great Hall is a wrecked shell, and the upper levels of Maegor’s Holdfast are gone, along with much of the outer walls. But the Tower of the Hand is standing, and behind it—braced by scaffolding—the White Sword Tower is, too. Jaime swallows at the sight of it, his mouth dry. Arya brings him to a doorway he doesn’t recognize—they’ve been busy with repairs here as well—where an unfamiliar guard waves them inside, and down a corridor. The door at the far end stands half-open, and as he comes to it, he realizes that his footsteps and his pounding heartbeat are the only sounds he can hear. Arya’s disappeared.

Jaime takes a deep breath, drawing the hood down to his shoulders, and steps through the doorway. His brother is waiting for him inside.

He looks so much older, Jaime thinks, horrified. It’s a long moment before he can muster any thought beyond that. Tyrion's face is impassive, the hooded eyes unreadable as they look him over, searching for something.

His brother breaks the silence, finally. “So you were in Lys.”

“After,” says Jaime, hoarse. “After the Stepstones. The pirates who found me—they found the boat—they took me there. Then I was sold to Lys as a slave.”

“We looked for your hand,” Tyrion says, “in the rubble. I offered a generous reward. It was never found. Melted by dragonfire, I came to think.” His voice is very low. “Every charred, unrecognizable corpse I saw, for weeks after, I wondered if it was you.”

Jaime can’t speak, can’t get the words out past the regret choking his throat. _I would never have survived my childhood,_ he remembers Tyrion saying. _You were all I had._ Shame curdles in his belly.

“I’m sorry,” he says, his voice cracking, and he sees Tyrion’s control start to go, then, the mask beginning to slide off his face.

Jaime takes a step forward, and another, and sinks to his knees. And then Tyrion’s arms come around him, an embrace that feels like a blow, and his brother is crying, and he’s crying too, both of them weeping into each other’s shoulders, like an awful parody of their last farewell.

Tyrion pulls away first, drawing in a deep breath, rebuilding his composure. Jaime opens his mouth to say it again, but his brother cuts him off, puts a hand to his shoulder. “We’ll talk later,” he says. “The King wants to see you now.” Jaime nods, wiping his eyes, and stands.

Tyrion leads him back into the corridor, and then up a stair. When they reach the landing, Jaime halts. His brother turns to look back at him. “Is she,” Jaime says, and stops, unable to continue.

“She’s not here,” Tyrion tells him, more gently than he deserves. “She’s in Winterfell, visiting Sansa. She won’t be back till the end of the month.” Jaime exhales, trembling with relief. He can face this, then. He still has no idea how he’s going to face her.


	4. Chapter 4

The king that he maimed waits for him in a wheeled chair. Jaime hadn’t been sorry to learn that the Iron Throne had been melted to slag, but the absence of a throne doesn’t make the sight of Brandon Stark any less unsettling. _I’m something else now,_ the boy had said, back in the godswood in Winterfell. Something not entirely human, Jaime thinks. He doesn’t acknowledge their entrance, and it’s only when Tyrion clears his throat and says, “Your Grace,” that his distant eyes refocus, coming to settle on them.

“Ser Jaime Lannister,” the King says.

“Your Grace,” Jaime replies cautiously, bowing his head. He’s not sure whether he ought to kneel and swear fealty, or beg to be pardoned, or ask what this strange king wants with him.

“Did you like the gardens?”

Whatever he’d been expecting, it wasn’t that, and Jaime is momentarily lost for words.

“In Lys,” the King clarifies.

“I—yes, Your Grace. What I saw of them,” he says. “My time was not my own, there.”

“Nor is it now,” says the King. “The time has come for you to return to your service to the Crown.”

Jaime swallows. “I’m a poor excuse for a fighter now, Your Grace. But if you wish me to serve in your forces, I will.”

“I don’t need you to fight,” the King tells him. “That’s not why you’re here.”

Jaime risks a glance at Tyrion, then, but his brother looks no more enlightened than he feels, although Tyrion’s probably more used to the feeling, after a year of dealing with this.

“This place was a forest, once,” says the King. His eyes are distant again, like he’s looking at something that’s not in the room with them. “Weirwoods still grew here, long after the Andals came. The last was only felled when Aegon built his fort. Then everything from this hill to the water was green.”

“It will be again, if the rains don’t stop soon,” Tyrion grouses. “We can scarcely lay a foundation without saplings coming up from the ash to interfere. It’s been two and a half centuries since anyone in this city bothered to think about drainage.”

“Queen Alysanne and her fountains,” agrees the King. “How are your sewers?”

“Bad,” says Tyrion. “We’ve got one functioning cistern, and if we sink the wells any deeper we’re going to hit seawater. And the cesspits are getting worse by the day, thanks to the rain, although we’re making some progress with that new channel by the Iron Gate.”

“It will go more easily now,” says the King. “But you might leave some saplings, for the gardens. It’s time for the weirwoods to come back.”

“Your Grace?” Tyrion asks, puzzled.

“You wanted an aquificer, my Hand. Now you have one,” the King tells him, with a nod towards Jaime.

Under any other circumstances, Tyrion’s astonished countenance would be a thing of beauty; some irreverent part of Jaime’s mind stores the image away to pull out and cherish later. The rest of him is occupied with trying not to panic.

“Your Grace, I—"

“You repaid the first of your debts in Winterfell,” the King says, cutting him off. “You have another to pay here. The small council will make the necessary arrangements. That will be all, Ser Jaime; my Hand. You are dismissed.”

Jaime manages a truncated bow and a muttered “Your Grace” before following Tyrion out of the room. He’s so dazed that about three steps later, he almost trips over his brother, who has halted in the corridor and is staring up at him with a peculiar expression. He tries to explain himself.

“In Lys, I worked for the man in charge of the sewers, and the iedarka,” he says. “That’s the—“

“I know what an iedarka is,” Tyrion interrupts, with precise enunciation. “You’re a fucking _aquificer?”_

Jaime grimaces. “Hardly. I just helped maintain the system. I don’t know how to _build_ one. I’m not—I wouldn’t know where to start. I can’t do any of the calculations.”

“Tarly will find you someone to do the calculations,” Tyrion says, with a dismissive wave of his hand. “I need someone who can do the _logistics_ , Jaime. I have enough on my hands dealing with the rest of the reconstruction plans, not to mention running the Six Kingdoms and keeping the peace and placating all the fools who might be thinking about launching another rebellion.” He shakes his head, then, and an odd smile comes over his face. "And here I thought I was the sewage expert in the family,” he adds, with not a little wonderment. “What in the world would Father say?”

“Probably the same thing he’d say when he finds out you’re Hand to a Stark king,” Jaime tells him, drily. “Are you sure you’re not better suited to the job?”

“Gods, no,” says Tyrion. “The drains at Casterly Rock presented a tidy little problem. King’s Landing is a very large mess. I know when I’m out of my depths.” He gestures at his stature, smirking. “Especially when I’m standing in a sewer.”

“So do I,” says Jaime. “This is it. He doesn’t want an iedarka, he wants—I don’t know, _weirwood groves._ A miracle.”

“He wants both,” says Tyrion. “And unless I’m mistaken, he’ll have what he wants, although none of us is likely live to see it come to fruition.”

Jaime is silent for a moment. “Did he know, this whole time?” he asks his brother. “Where I was, what I was doing—was this his bloody _plan_?”

“I don’t know,” Tyrion says, subdued. “You could ask, but I’ve found it’s usually better not to.”

Jaime just sighs. His brother smiles at him, again. “Well. Let’s get you a hand. Wood, perhaps, this time. And some new clothes.” He’s still wearing the simple tunic and trousers of a Lyseni slave, under the cloak.

“All right,” Jaime tells him, because it’s not like he can refuse his brother, not when Tyrion’s smiling at him like that, even if some part of him wants to go back to the King and plead for answers to questions that are better left unasked.

By the end of the day, he has chambers—in the Tower of the Hand, below his brother’s—a decent pair of boots and a start on a new wardrobe, and a very long list of problems to tackle in the morning. It’s dizzying. For a moment, he desperately longs to be back in the aquificers’ building in Lys, listening to Arko’s complaints and filthy jokes. And then he’s ashamed of himself, for that—what kind of a man would wish to be a slave? But it had been so easy to let go of his life, to just drift for a time, after so many exhausting years of swimming against the current. The prospect of it is so tiring that he falls asleep as soon as his head meets the pillow, despite all the things that ought to be keeping him awake.

In the morning, he dresses himself in his new clothes, looking out of the window, which faces the training yard, and the White Sword Tower beyond it. A group of men he doesn’t know are drilling there, making a fairly respectable effort, and then a dark-headed figure in a white cloak appears. It’s only when someone calls out “Ser Podrick!” that he recognizes the line of the man’s shoulders, and he has to sit down, suddenly, before his knees fail him.

 _Ser Podrick._ That must be her doing. He has a sudden vision of her, drawing Oathkeeper and lowering it to her squire’s shoulder, her voice proud and steady as she pronounces the words, with that tiny half-smile curving her severe mouth. And then he can’t stop himself remembering it: the sight of her kneeling before him, her eyes lowered, the moment when they’d both held their breath—his palm damp around the hilt of his sword as he gripped and lifted it, the blade catching the firelight, shining. He crumples into himself, then, bringing his hand to his face, dragging in deep, uneven breaths, until the vision dissipates enough for him to get up again and go about the business awaiting him.

So Jaime begins another new life, except it isn’t new at all; it’s a profoundly strange patchwork of all the ones he’s lived before. He sleeps in the Red Keep, spends his days reacquainting himself with the streets of King’s Landing—what’s left of them—and surveying what lies beneath, trying not to spot illusory caches of wildfire lurking around every blind corner. He sees familiar faces—his brother, Ser Davos, fucking Bronn of fucking _Highgarden_ who is also somehow now the fucking Master of Coin and therefore has to be alternately wheedled and threatened into supplying the funds they’ll need for the aqueduct and sewers—and many new ones, and tries not to think about all the faces that have gone missing. He sees little of the King, and never sets foot in the White Sword Tower, nor, if he can help it, the armory and the training yard. He doesn’t need to: instead of sparring and drilling and planning for war, his time is spent measuring elevations and tracking flood patterns and painstakingly mapping out all the broken places in need of repair.

Samwell Tarly brings him the promised assistant, a thin, black-haired young woman from Oldtown with sharp elbows and a sharp nose and a sharp look in her eyes that reminds him, somewhat uncomfortably, of Arya. “Gilly met her at the Citadel,” Tarly explains to Jaime, the day before she arrives. “Neither of them were allowed inside, of course, but Margit gave lessons to the children there to earn coin, and also to some of the apprentices who needed help with their sums, in exchange for smuggling out copies of things she wanted from the library.”

Margit is wary, when she’s brought to the small chamber Jaime’s been granted as an office, like she expects to be dismissed without serious consideration. But once he gets her talking, it rapidly becomes apparent that she’s terrifyingly intelligent—Jaime starts to feel like a dunce less than ten minutes into the conversation—and he thinks she’ll be able to deal with all the things that stump him, like calculating flow rates and drafting schematics for arches that won’t fall down. She’s a little startled when he tells her, half an hour after they’ve met, that he wants her for his assistant. But she accepts with alacrity, and he breathes a sigh of relief after he’s sent her off to the Grand Maester’s offices to be issued quarters and a salary and an abacus, as well as all the paper and ink that she wants.

He strolls off to update Tyrion, his mood a little more buoyant, and then he comes round a corner and nearly runs smack into Podrick Payne— _Ser Podrick_ —coming out of the wing that holds the King’s chambers. 

Pod is itching to hit him. It’s obvious from the clench of his fist, the set of his jaw. Jaime wishes he would. He wants it, wants to taste the blood from a split lip, to feel the ache of the bruises, later. It would be easier to wear his wounds on his skin. But Pod is Brienne’s, now, molded in her image, which means he’s too good to strike an unarmed, one-handed man, not without further provocation.

“Ser Podrick,” he manages to say. “Congratulations on being named to the Kingsguard.”

Pod gives him a brief nod of acknowledgment. “Ser Jaime. I heard you'd returned.”

“The King,” Jaime says. “He wants me to—to assist with the reconstruction.”

Pod nods, again. “I wish you well with it,” he says, and starts to walk away, and Jaime should just let him, shouldn’t try to keep him from going, but instead, he opens his fool mouth.

“Is she,” he says, and Pod turns back to look at him. “How is—the Lord Commander, is she well?” _Is she all right, is she happy, is she whole._

“I don’t tell tales,” says Pod. Jaime shakes his head, mutely. _Tell me,_ he wants to beg. He says nothing.

After a moment, Pod sighs, watching him. “It was difficult for everyone,” he says, “when we saw what awaited us here, after the war. But the Lord Commander is strong. She’s proud to serve the King, and she serves him well.”

"Does she know," Jaime says, and doesn't finish the sentence.

"Lord Tyrion sent a raven to Winterfell," Pod tells him.

Jaime nods, then, silent, and Pod watches him for a beat longer, before turning away. He sees Pod a few more times—crossing the training yard, wheeling the King from the council room—but they don’t speak again.

She comes back a fortnight later. Jaime knows, because Tyrion tells him. Tyrion continues to be very gentle with him, whether out of pity or relief Jaime’s not entirely sure. He doesn’t seek her out. He nervously counts the days till the next council meeting—he’s not a member, but he’s expected to attend on occasions when his work comes up on the agenda—and tries to ready himself, thinks about the moment when he’ll see her again, what he’ll say, what she’ll do. He spends so much time thinking about it that he forgets to think about the possibility that he might encounter her elsewhere, so it’s a shock when he comes out of the Tower of the Hand one morning and she’s there—standing in the yard, not ten feet away, a shining column of white and gold. It turns out he’s not ready at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Life has been interfering with fic production, lately, and this chapter was especially troublesome—but don't worry, I have some sense of where this is going now, and it may be several days between updates but the rest will get written before long.


	5. Chapter 5

In that first startled moment, he’s worried that she might rage at him, which he can bear, or that she might weep, as she had when they’d last parted, which he can’t—but she does neither. She stands very still, looking at him. He can’t speak, and it’s almost a relief when she breaks the silence instead.

“Ser Jaime,” she says, in that deep clear voice, and it washes over him like cool water, making gooseflesh out of his skin. Her voice has always been lovely to him, long before he ever would have admitted as much, even back in the days when she’d only ever used it for curt orders and disdainful replies, even when she’d still been calling him _Kingslayer._

“Ser Brienne,” he croaks, and then corrects himself, his voice steadier: “Lord Commander.” It fits her, he thinks. He can’t quite bring himself to meet her eyes, so he looks at the rest of her instead, drinking in the sight. The new armor suits her—less gaudy than the old Kingsguard design, a burnished gold a shade darker than her hair—and so does the long white cloak. It’s like looking at a mirror image of his former self. He wonders, for a moment, if she still has the simple, steel-blue set he’d given her. She’s still wearing Oathkeeper, he sees, and he’s painfully grateful for that.

He manages a crooked smile, then. “My compliments on your promotion, Ser. The King could not have chosen better.”

She colors, slightly—oh, fuck, does she think that he’s mocking her?—but his sincerity must be evident on his face, because she gives him a small nod, the firm line of her mouth slackening a little. “He has another purpose for you now, I understand,” she says, and Jaime nods.

“I’m here to oversee the reconstruction of the sewers, and new water channels and reservoirs. I was—I found myself in Lys, a slave of the city, and learned something of the matter there. It seems the King was aware of my fate, and planned to bring me back to put the knowledge to use.” It’s easier to take refuge in the topic of work, to avoid everything else that stands unresolved between them. “I hope you—I hope it’s gone well, taking over the Kingsguard. I’ve seen your men training in the yard; they seem to be fine soldiers. And Ser Podrick, too, of course.” He tries to convey his recognition, his approval, and she nods again, her eyes steady on him.

“It’s my duty,” she says. “I mean to do it well.”

Jaime achieves something closer to a proper smile. “Of course you will,” he tells her, meaning it. “King Bran’s chosen his servants wisely, with the possible exception of my brother and myself.” The jest doesn’t land; her brow furrows slightly, shifting into that familiar almost-frown.

After a moment, she says, “Some of your things were found in the tower, when we arrived. I—they were set aside; Lord Tyrion must know what became of them.”

Jaime shakes his head. “He’s given me everything I need for the work,” he tells her, raising his wooden hand to let her see it clearly—it’s a fine replacement, lighter than the gilded metal, and cleverly designed, with rough hatching on one of the fingertips to hold papers in place, and a carved thumb that allows him to grasp some objects, imperfectly. “I don’t want anything from—from before.”

He’s not sure what Brienne makes of that, but she gives him another brisk nod, her chin going up, and then looks towards the yard. “I should go,” she says, “the men will be waiting for me.”

“Of course, Ser,” he replies.

But she halts after a step, and looks back at him, then says, “I’m—I’m sorry for your losses, Ser Jaime,” before turning and striding away, quickly, before he can respond. She must—she means _Cersei_ , he realizes, and the child, and he suddenly feels winded, as if he’s been sparring. It takes a moment to catch his breath, and then he makes his way slowly to his office, and sits staring out the window, unseeing, until Margit strolls in talking rapidly about catchment areas and waving an annotated chart before his dazed eyes.

So he deals with it, as best he can. He gets through the council meeting, somehow, despite his acute awareness of her presence at the other end of the table. He feels every one of her occasional glances in his direction—her gaze seems to scorch his skin, although there’s no fire in her eyes, just a cool, impenetrable regard, her features as controlled as her voice. He nods to her, briefly, when he leaves after his part of the meeting is finished, and she returns the gesture, but says nothing. When the door closes behind him, he realizes his heart is pounding, and he’s lightheaded. He has to wait, he tells himself. In Winterfell he’d been a drunken fool, but she’d seen through his posturing, seen his groundless jealousy and desperate desire for what they were, even though she’d looked as if she disbelieved her own dawning realization. She must be able to see it now, the longing ache that overcomes him in her presence. But he has to wait. It has to be her choice, whether or not to reopen the door he’d slammed in her face when he’d left her sobbing in the freezing night and ridden away, cursing himself with every hoofbeat.

A fortnight or so later, he goes to Tarly’s office, meaning to make inquiries about getting a few more maesters assigned to help Margit draw up the plans for the aqueduct he intends to run from the springs outside the city to the reservoir they’re going to build where the Great Sept used to stand. Tarly agrees, absent-mindedly—his little daughter’s just started walking, and it’s all he seems to be able to think about at the moment—and then realizes he’s late for a meeting. He gathers up a stack of papers to take with him, and that’s when Jaime sees the White Book resting on his desk.

“What—why is that here?” he asks, before he can think better of it.

“Oh,” says Tarly, looking startled. “I asked Ser Brienne to lend it to me, for reference—I thought I’d update Archmaester Ebrose’s new history of the War of the Five Kings. Your brother seemed to be concerned that it contained a number of inaccuracies.” He glances at Jaime, looks like he’s surprised, for a moment, to recall that the man standing before him is the same one who’d once kept the White Book, whose partial, bitter history it contains. Then his eyes twitch back to the drained hourglass and he clutches his papers to his chest and rushes to the door, tossing back a quick, “Sorry, Ser, I must be going now,” on the way out.

Jaime goes over to the desk, despite himself, and rests his palm on the familiar worn leather of the binding. Then he sits, and opens the book, and turns to his page—and the breath’s knocked out of him when he sees the tidy column of script filling it, continuing on to the next. He starts to read, almost bewildered. It’s a factual, but flattering account, the kind of thing that could only have been written by someone who, despite everything he’s done, still can’t manage to hate him. _Oh, Brienne._ A drop splashes onto the page, then, and he realizes there are tears on his face. He blots it away with a hasty swipe of his cuff before the ink can start to run, marring her precise lettering, the evidence of her extraordinary, unwarranted generosity.

When he reaches the end, he sits there for a moment, gripped and immobile, and then reaches, clumsily, for the inkpot. He picks up a quill, and scratches out the last line— _died protecting his Queen_ —no. Not that. He pauses, thinking, and then begins to write, slowly, his left-handed scrawl forming an ugly appendage to her elegant hand: _Failed to save the city. Injured while fleeing the Red Keep with his sister. Rescued by pirates and sold to Lys, where he worked as a slave in the sewers. Returned by Arya Stark to King’s Landing a year and three months later, to assist with the reconstruction of the capital, in the service of King Brandon Stark._ He stops there, and finds a scrap of spare paper to blot the page with, careful, before closing the book and rising and leaving the empty room.

He’s not sure when exactly Tarly returns the book to her, but he realizes that she must have seen it, because she looks at him differently the next time he appears at a council meeting—it’s something fleeting and inscrutable in her gaze, but it’s there. It distracts him while he explains the plans for the aqueduct and the reservoir, and wearily parries Bronn’s irritable comments about the budget. He looks for it again, when she rises to go, but she’s already turning away, and he can’t think of any good excuse to make her glance back at him.

He keeps thinking about it, that night, and after drinking his way through the better part of a jug of Tyrion’s Dornish red, his feet bring him to the foot of the White Sword Tower, seemingly working of their own accord. If he weren’t more than half-drunk, he’d stop himself, but he is, so he just keeps going—up the stairs, past every familiar stone, until he’s at the threshold of the chambers that used to be his own. He knocks on the door, and almost falls in when it opens.

Brienne is staring at him, startled, caught off guard. Her armor is gone, although she’s still wearing the thick black gambeson of leather and wool that goes under it. She looks smaller without the bulky plate, for all that she’s still a good inch or so taller than him. It takes her a moment to gather herself, so he glimpses it again, that echo of feeling in her eyes, before she shutters her expression, and then he can’t hold back any longer.

“I saw what you wrote,” he tells her. “In the White Book. I fixed it. I tried to—I changed the ending.”

She’s still staring. After a pause, she says, “Ser Jaime,” and he can’t bear that brisk formality, not for a moment more, so he interrupts her, says, “Brienne. I’m sorry.” Her eyes go wide, almost alarmed, when he says her name that way, ungraced by any title. “I should have—I should have tried to get word to you, to Tyrion, from Lys. Tell you I was alive. I’m sorry. I couldn’t—it was too hard to think about it, about you, then. It seemed better to let you all just believe I was gone.” She’s shaking her head, now, something starting to crumble behind her eyes. He realizes, suddenly, what he’s just done here, coming drunk to her door late in the night, what she must be remembering as a result, what she must think of him.

“I’m so sorry,” he says again, the anguish now audible in his voice—and she startles backwards a step, like he’s brandished a weapon. Her nose is reddening, her chin starting to wobble, and he sees, desperately, that she’s on the verge of tears. Her breaths are coming small and strangled, and it makes it even worse, it guts him all over again, that she won’t even let herself weep freely, not where he can witness it.

He moves to touch her, then, take her in his arms, even though he knows he has no right. He can’t stand to see her like this, to leave her uncomforted. She flinches from his hand, turns her face away from him, and he says, choking, “ _Please._ Brienne. Let me. Hit me later, beat me if you want, I won’t stop you. Or let me go get Pod. Please. I can’t leave you like this,” but she doesn’t respond, doesn’t look at him at all. He sees her shoulders trembling, the tiny jerks of motion she’s trying to subdue. So he goes—stumbles blindly into the corridor, then into the common room a few doors down, where Pod is sitting by the fire, cleaning a sword.

Pod glances at him, and then rears up on his heels, alarmed. “She’s,” Jaime says, his voice cracking, then masters himself enough to get the words out: “Ser Brienne. She’s—I’ve upset her, and I can’t—please, just go to her. She needs—someone. Not me. Now. _Please._ ” Pod shoots him a furious look, and for a moment Jaime thinks the boy might actually, finally, punch him, but he doesn’t stop to do it, he just goes, and a moment later, Jaime hears Pod opening her door, and the gentle low rumble of his voice, before it closes again. He breathes out, and sinks down onto the bench, half-blind, puts his hand over his eyes. He can’t move, so he waits by the fire. _Hateful,_ he thinks. What kind of curse has he called onto himself, to always be a misery and a failure to everyone he's ever dared to love? Despair bears down on him, heavy and crushing.

It’s a long time before Pod’s shadow falls over him once more, and Jaime scrubs his sleeve across his face. He’d been lost in his churning thoughts, hadn’t heard her door open or close. He feels Pod's weight settle onto the bench beside him. After a moment, Pod says, “You still love her.”

Jaime nods, bleak. “I never stopped,” he says, and Pod sighs.

“It would be better if I hadn’t come back,” Jaime tells him.

“I don’t know about that,” Pod says, considering. “When Lord Tyrion told us you were presumed dead, she was—” he breaks off, pauses. “It was bad enough after you left Winterfell.”

“I said—things, when I went. I thought it would be better, if I gave her no reason to mourn me,” he explains, although it’s a half-truth: he’d tried to steal away like a thief, gotten caught, and then reached, blindly, for whatever cruel words he could muster to make her stop looking at him that way, take her warm hands off his face.

“Didn’t work,” Pod tells him, bluntly.

“I’d go to Casterly Rock, if I could, or anywhere else,” Jaime says. “Make it easier for her. But the King wants me here. I could move out of the Keep, perhaps, find some other place to stay, in the city. She wouldn’t have to see me, then.”

“Is that what you want?” Pod asks, earnest, the sincerity on his face almost heartbreaking.

“What I want isn’t possible,” Jaime says, his throat aching. He can repair every broken place in this city before he’ll be able to fix what he’d just seen, torn and unmended, when he’d finally looked into the deep well of her eyes.

Pod shakes his head. “I don’t know if that’s so,” he says. “But you can’t do it like this, Ser. Give her time to heal, to understand.” His mouth twitches. “And maybe try doing it sober, next time.”

Jaime makes a noise like a bitter laugh, then, although he wants to howl instead. It’s pointless. But he can’t sit here all night, so he lets Pod haul him upright and steer him with a kindly arm down the stair and back to his chambers, and he passes out on top of the covers before the door closes behind him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry, everybody; there's a reason I put angst in the tags. The next chapter will have less crying, I promise, although I'm not saying we're quite done with the crying yet.


	6. Chapter 6

The hangover hardly feels like sufficient penance, but it’s what he’s got, so he grits his teeth and forces himself to the office the next morning, once he’s done throwing up. Margit makes a face when she sees the state of him, but she doesn’t comment, just hands him a stack of plans to review and gives him a wide berth for the remainder of the day.

Tyrion finds him moping in his chambers that evening, and scowls. “That’s it, you’re banned from my cellars. I didn’t realize you’d lost your head for it, in Lys. It’s not like they haven’t got wine there too.”

“I didn’t get the chance to drink much of it,” Jaime says, although he’d had his fair share of Arko’s supply. But he’d only partaken moderately. Last night was the first time he’d been anywhere close to drunkenness since—well, since the last time. In Winterfell. He winces.

“I suggest you think of some way to make it up to the Lord Commander,” his brother says, looking stern—it’s amazing how effectively he manages to channel Tywin nowadays, when he makes the effort. “I need her in effective condition. We have a delegation from Dorne coming the day after tomorrow.”

“She doesn’t want to see me,” he tells Tyrion.

“You fucking idiot,” says his brother. “She’s miserable. The only person here more miserable than her is you. And if you don’t see it, it’s only because you’re too much of a coward to look her in the eyes.”

“I did,” Jaime insists. “I looked. That’s the problem.” He can’t stop thinking about what he’d seen, when he had.

Tyrion sighs, exasperated, and goes, leaving him there with his aching head and his regrets.

He sees Brienne the next morning, crossing the training yard. At first he thinks she might ignore him, walk past him as if he’s not there, but he forces himself to stand, waiting, in her path, and her steps slow as she comes closer. Her face is pale, but composed.

“Lord Commander,” he says, taking refuge in painstaking formality. “I apologize for my conduct the other night. It was unconscionable. I was—indisposed.” He takes a deep breath. “If you’d prefer, I can seek other quarters, outside of the keep. So as not to disturb you.”

Brienne’s wearing that distant, guarded expression he remembers from the old days, her eyes skating over his face, never quite meeting his. “No, Ser. You needn’t be concerned,” she tells him, her voice low.

Jaime swallows, and nods. “I hope you can forgive my—rashness, in altering the White Book. That’s your prerogative, now; I shouldn’t have interfered. I was just—moved, by your kindness in completing the record, and acted without thinking.”

She’s startled; for a moment her eyes catch his, a flash of unsettled blue. “Of course I don’t mind. I should have thought to do it myself, before now,” she says, a little slowly.

Jaime shakes his head. She’s far too conscientious. She always has been. After a moment, she adds, abruptly, “Please don’t think you need—to stay away, on my account. I wouldn’t wish that,” and he wonders what Pod had told her, how much of their conversation he’d shared. She glances at him again. “I’m glad that you survived, Ser Jaime. That you made it back here.”

It’s his turn to be surprised—there’s a strange tightness in his throat, but the weight on his chest lessens a little, as he takes in her words. “I’m grateful to hear that, my lady—Ser,” he corrects himself. “I’ll try not to give you cause to feel otherwise.” He pauses. “Are we—on good terms, then?” he asks, trying to keep the pleading note out of his voice.

Brienne gives him a careful half-smile. “Of course, Ser,” she tells him.

Jaime exhales, offers an equally careful smile in return. “Thank you,” he says, the words coming out a little more fervently than he’d intended. “I should—Margit is waiting for me, I should go.”

She nods, still solemn, but her eyes are kind, and his heart seems to beat again at the sight of it. It’s enough. It’s more than he deserves, and he’s grateful. She’s granted him the kindness of treating him as a comrade, despite everything, maybe even as a friend. He can live with that, even if some traitorous part of him still wants to beg for more.

The Dornish delegation arrives the next morning, and Jaime does his best to stay the hell out of their way, although he doesn’t think any of them had particularly close ties to his dead enemies among their countrymen, or countrywomen. He’d prefer not to be reminded of Dorne at all, since it just makes him think of Myrcella, or the terrible, foolish things he’s done while drunk on Dornish wine, neither of which are profitable subjects to contemplate. Thankfully, he’s able to keep himself occupied these days with the work on the reservoir project, which is ramping up apace.

The reservoir is the key to everything else: larger than all four of the previous cisterns combined, it will hold clean water for drinking, fed by the aqueduct that's already under construction from the springs in the hills, as well as by a series of rainwater-collection tanks to be added in future. A separate, lower chamber will collect drainage from the gutters and excess rainfall, which can be diverted to flush out the sewers, and when the supply allows, to water the parks and gardens that will eventually grace the rebuilt capital. The king had made plain, even before Jaime’s return, his desire for more green spaces in the new city plan, and Tyrion had readily agreed—“it’s not like we need to reserve all that room for construction,” he’d told Jaime, with a grim smile, “since the number of people in the city is less than half what it was before. And, well—gardens may help attract more survivors to return, or newcomers to settle here, in future. Gods know we’ll need them.”

Tyrion had also asked, with deliberate offhandedness, if Jaime was entirely at ease with the decision to locate the reservoir in the shattered space where the Sept of Baelor had once stood. He’d managed to pose the question without directly pointing out that it was, in effect, the mass grave of half their family, not to mention several thousand other souls. Jaime had just shaken his head—the decision had been his own, and he’s sure of it. “It’s the best option, for both location and elevation, and it saves time and money because we won’t have excavate down into the rock, since there were catacombs already.” He’d shrugged, then, seeing Tyrion’s skeptical look. “What else would we do with it? None of you sound eager to build a new sept there, and the Faith has already claimed the one by the Old Gate as a successor. It’s too central a place to leave untouched, like a shrine—people will just end up building slums over it another twenty years from now. At least this way, it’s useful.”

And though he doesn’t say it, to Tyrion or anyone else, there’s a part of him that’s pleased by the notion: it seems a better form of tribute, to build something that will last, something that will be of service to the city, in place of the ruin left by the terrible crime he’d failed to prevent. To have a hand in its making, he thinks, might serve as a way of paying his respects to the lost dead, his own and others’. As he spends his days drawing up plans, reviewing reports, or visiting the site to check the workmen's progress, as the deep hole in the ground starts to take shape, it starts to feel a little like keeping a vigil, or having a one-sided conversation with them. On the better days, anyway.

“Where’s that chart for the siphon?” he asks Margit, who seems a little distracted this morning.

“Right here,” she tells him, handing it over and rolling her eyes at his recurring failure to navigate the mess on her drafting table, before returning to thumbing the beads on her abacus and scribbling notations on a page.

Jaime pins the chart to his desk with his wooden fingertip, and flicks through the latest report from the foreman. “They should be able to test the new channel three days from now,” he tells her. “I’m going to go have a look at it myself; want to come?” She nods, absent-mindedly, still occupied with her calculations.

When he heads out a little while later to fetch a cup of tea, he sees Pod coming down the corridor, and exchanges a genial hello with him. Pod’s been almost friendly, of late, probably because Brienne, too, has been almost friendly—they don’t share meals, or confidences, but there’s the occasional brief conversation in the corridor or the training yard, or while waiting for a council meeting to get started. They talk about their work, or the weather, or the news coming in from the rest of the kingdoms, and he does his best to be glad, even though there’s always a pang in his chest when he sees the fair crown of her head in the distance, towering over her companions.

Pod hasn't mentioned their conversation by the fire again, although he stops by rather frequently these days. At first Jaime had thought the boy was checking up on him, and had almost bristled at it, before he’d realized Pod’s actually checking up on _Margit._ That was—unexpected. He wonders when it started. But Margit is a little less sharp-tongued after Pod’s been round, and it’s really quite sweet, he thinks, although he doesn’t dare say anything; she’d just snap at him and hide his paperwork in retaliation.

It’s another five days before they can run the test, because nothing gets done according to schedule, but the first attempt goes well—Jaime exults at the sight of the clear rushing water filling the channel, and grins at Margit, clutching the ropes beside him on the narrow catwalk above. Of course, something gets fouled up shortly thereafter, so he sends her back up to tell the foreman to close the sluicegates, and when the flow subsides to a trickle, he jumps down into the channel to go look at the next junction upstream.

Margit comes back a quarter-hour later, while he’s still searching for the problem. “Any luck?” she calls to him, her voice echoing down the tunnel.

“Can’t tell,” he says, absently, as her footsteps draw closer. “We might need to turn it back on again, while someone stays here to watch,” and he’s about to send her off to do just that, when there’s a strange rumbling noise, and he has just a moment to think _oh, fuck_ —before the water rolls down on him, sweeping him away. He thrashes against the force of it, surfaces for a second, gasping for air, and then goes back down, into the cold, churning whirl. He manages to be sorry, for an instant, that it’s going to end like this—although it’s a better way to go than being buried under a pile of bricks. And then everything’s dark, and he’s gone.

There’s a crushing weight on his chest. For a moment, Jaime thinks he’s back under the rubble of the Red Keep—but no, it’s brighter here, the light red through his sealed eyelids, and there's more noise. No gulls, he thinks, muzzily, _thank gods for that_ , and then he starts coughing, suddenly aware of the water choking his lungs. “Turn him,” a distant voice says, and then it’s all coming up, vomiting out, stripping away the lining of his throat with it. He chokes again, but there’s a firm hand pounding his back, and he keeps coughing and puking until he’s empty and raw, and then he blacks out.

When he opens his eyes, Tarly is there, the round face beaming down at him with a benevolent kind of approval, like he’s a toddler who’s managed a new trick. “You gave us a scare, Ser,” the maester tells him.

“Margit,” Jaime croaks, remembering that she’d been standing on the catwalk right over his head, and Tarly soothes him. “She’s fine, Ser. She saw it coming, and was high enough to grab hold of the rope, and pull herself up. She raised the alarm, and the rest of the crew fished you out. No one else was injured—you were quite lucky, all of you.”

“Good,” Jaime tells him, and passes out again.

He thinks he’s alone, at first, the next time he wakes up, but then he sees Brienne sitting in the chair at his bedside. “Sorry,” he tells her, and she gives him a painful little smile—her eyes are slightly reddened, and he realizes, suddenly, that she looks different, that some barrier in her gaze has been swept away. Her face is more open to him than it’s been in—in more than a year, almost two, except for those few fleeting flashes. It’s hard to breathe, when he sees it, although there’s no water left in his lungs.

Brienne draws a nervous breath. “How are you feeling?” she asks, and it feels like a benediction, hearing the deep, ringing bell of her voice.

“Better,” he says, and manages a wobbly grin. He tries to sit up, and she frowns at him, but she gives in when he persists, and reaches to help him, one hand firm under his shoulder while the other props the pillow up behind his head.

“Your brother was very concerned,” she tells him, and Jaime grimaces. “He was here earlier, but had to leave to meet with the new ambassador from Pentos.”

“I’ll make it up to him,” he promises her.

After a moment, she says, “I was, too,” her voice low, eyes flickering up to meet his. But before he can apologize again, she squeezes his hand, and he smiles at her, like a reflex. “You might try and keep out of the way, next time,” she tells him.

“I will,” he says. “I promise.” She nods.

“Did we lose all the sluicegates?” he asks, mournfully. It’s going to take a month to get the bloody things back in order.

She shakes her head. “No,” she says, “not if I’m understanding Margit correctly. It was just one that failed, upstream. It will need to be replaced, but the rest can be repaired,” and Jaime breathes a sigh of relief.

Brienne smiles at him, then. “It’s strange, to see you brooding over sluicegates, instead of troop numbers and supply lines.” She sounds almost amused, and some little carillon inside him starts chiming in response.

“It’s not that different,” he tells her, smiling back. “Once you get used to it. I figured that out, in Lys.”

He wants to say more, but it’s not the right time, not yet. So he leaves it alone. He lets her tell him about the ambassador from Pentos, and thanks her for coming when she rises to go. But she touches his hand again before she leaves, and as he listens to her footsteps echoing down the corridor, he thinks a door might be—not exactly open, but ajar, now. He closes his eyes, and lets sleep take him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did you know that Dubronvik (the filming location for King's Landing) has one of the earliest medieval sewer systems in Europe, with a charter dating back to 1296? I didn't, not until I started writing this thing and googled "medieval sewers" a week and a half ago. Anyway, the next chapter will feature less infrastructure, and more feelings.


	7. Chapter 7

He badgers Tarly into letting him out of the sickroom the next day, although he’s still sore and easily winded, all his old wounds discovering new ways to pain him. He seeks out Margit first, and she blushes and scowls when he thanks her for saving his life and promises her a promotion. She wrinkles her nose and starts talking about sluicegate repairs, and Jaime grins at her and makes a mental note to remind Tyrion to increase her pay.

Tyrion rolls his eyes when Jaime staggers into the council meeting that afternoon. Brienne seems slightly dismayed by his presumably decrepit appearance, so he smiles at her, and she drops her eyes to the table for a beat before giving him a reproving look, although the corner of her mouth turns up despite herself, as he plunges into an update on the outcome of the tests and the eternally beleaguered state of his budget.

Somehow Tyrion manages to persuade her to dine with the two of them, later that evening, and she even agrees to take a half-cup of wine at the end of the meal. “To your remarkably consistent failure to drown yourself, despite your very best efforts,” his brother toasts, and Jaime laughs.

“I’m not making a habit of it,” he says. Tyrion’s distress at his mishap is obvious, although he’s buried it, in his typical fashion, under a layer of slanderous sarcasm. But Jaime still goes warm inside at the evidence of his brother’s concern, even if the feeling is partly down to the wine.

“Liar,” says Tyrion. “He’s been a reckless fool since he learnt to swim,” his brother informs Brienne, who raises an eyebrow. “I still remember the time you jumped into the sea from the cliffs at Casterly Rock,” he adds, looking back to Jaime.

“You’re repeating tales, now,” he says. “You’re far too young to remember that.” Tyrion couldn’t have been more than three at the time.

“Hardly,” says Tyrion, with an exaggerated shudder. “Father’s temper always made quite an impression, even at a tender age. He had you whipped for that one, I believe.”

Jaime takes another sip of his wine, to stop himself from saying something rude in reply. He remembers the smarting welts the switch had left on his skin, and refusing to let Tywin see him cry. Cersei had comforted him, after. He sighs, and gives his brother a pointed look. “Whereas you, on the other hand, prefer to punish me with a tongue-lashing,” he says, and Tyrion chuckles.

Brienne’s watching the two of them, superficially amused, but there’s something thoughtful in her eyes. “I used to sneak away to go swimming in the straits,” she says, after a moment. “It drove my septa to distraction,” and Jaime grins at her.

“See?” he says to his brother. “Not everyone here is afraid of the water.”

Tyrion laughs, and launches into an undoubtedly embroidered tale of the time Jorah Mormont once saved him from drowning while crossing the ruins of Old Valyria, and before long he’s quoting poetry, clearly a little drunker than either of his guests. Jaime raises a glass to him when he finishes the recitation, and Brienne begs her leave, then, saying she’s got to rise early in the morning to drill her men. Jaime stands, politely, as she goes, and once she’s gone he looks back at his brother, who’s smiling at him, looking equal parts wistful and smug.

“Don’t fuck it up again,” Tyrion tells him, and Jaime makes a rude gesture before departing, though he can’t stop himself from smiling a little as he heads out the door. He takes himself downstairs to bed, pausing to stretch and grimace at the ache in his shoulders, and falls asleep thinking about Brienne.

He thinks about her constantly, now, about every moment, every exchange, in their long acquaintance—it’s a bit of a shock to realize he’s known her for more than seven years. He forces himself to inventory every stupid, vicious thing he’d said to her when he was her prisoner, and then he thinks about the stern kindness she’d shown him—tending to his weakened body, and prodding his fractured soul, to keep him alive—in the days after his maiming. He thinks about how she'd gone blank with anguish when they’d heard the news, on the road from Harrenhal to King’s Landing, of the Red Wedding—how she wouldn’t let herself cry in front of Bolton’s men, but rose red-eyed and grim-faced from her bedroll in the morning. He thinks about the way her forehead had furrowed in the sunlight, just before she’d met his eyes and told him the name of her sword. He thinks about the look on her face when she’d offered it back to him, in his tent at Riverrun, and the faint glimmer of her hair in the moonlight as Pod rowed her away, and his profound, aching relief in that moment, realizing that she’d survived, that she was going to escape him.

He thinks about Winterfell, about how she’d vouched for him at his trial; how she’d smiled, tears of joy in her eyes, after her knighting. He thinks about her constant presence alongside him during the long, grueling hours of the battle, always shoring up his weak right side, their twin swords slashing and hacking in a desperate, perfectly choreographed dance. Although he tries not to dwell on it, he also thinks about what followed: the burials and the feast, the drinking, the brilliant surprise of her laughter, and her sudden, pained flush at Tyrion’s juvenile probing. He thinks about the way she’d watched him, nervous and wanting and resolute, as she’d unlaced her shirt, and pulled off his own. He thinks about her body, every long, pale, scarred inch of her, the taste of her skin, the scent of her hidden places, the sounds she’d made when he touched her, the way she’d kept her eyes closed at first, as if she was hiding from his avid gaze, but then, and more often as the nights continued, how she’d looked at him with open amazement, like his aging, maimed body was a marvel to her. It had been so strange, alternately fierce and tender, to share her bed: like no kind of intimacy he’d ever known, a constant process of revelation. He misses her touch.

After another fortnight or so of thinking about it—“you must have swallowed more water than I'd thought,” Margit says one day, “or got hit on the head; that’s the third time I’ve explained those figures to you”—he finds himself at the foot of the White Sword Tower again, still thinking. He’s sober, although he’s feeling strangely dazzled; the evening light has turned the pale stone to gold. It seems odd, now, to remember the life he’d once lived inside these walls. He climbs the stairs slowly, and comes to the common room.

Pod’s there, polishing his armor. Jaime spots the White Book on the table behind him.

“Ser Jaime?” Pod asks, looking puzzled. Jaime’s hovering in the doorway like an idiot.

“Is the Lord Commander here?” he asks, wondering where his breath has gone.

“She’s in her chambers,” Pod tells him.

“I,” he says, and then stops. Pod’s watching him with a kindly sort of appraisal, like he’s evaluating Jaime’s prospects as a recruit.

“Go,” says Pod, after a moment, so he does.

He knocks on her door, and steps back, waiting. When she opens it, he’s careful to stay beyond the threshold. She’s still wearing most of her armor, he notes, although the gauntlets and greaves are gone. The light is shining warm through the windows, the whole chamber hazy and golden. “Ser Brienne,” he says. “I wondered if I might have a word with you?”

She steps back from the door. “Of course,” she says, slowly, and let him in. He breathes, and enters, waits for her to close the door behind him.

“I wanted to—to explain some things,” he says. “You can stop me, if you want. At any time. But I owe it to you, to make this clear.”

She nods, wary but patient. Willing to hear him out. She’s biting her lip, but her eyes are steady.

“When I left Winterfell,” he says, and pauses, hearing her sudden, startled inhale. “I hurt you,” he says. “I’m sorry. It wasn’t from—not caring. I felt that—that it was my duty, to go. And I didn’t want you to follow me.”

Brienne gives him a tense, abrupt nod, the lines in her face springing into relief.

Jaime takes a deep breath, and continues. “I left, because—”

“You loved her,” she says, softly. Her face is very pale, now, but her voice doesn’t tremble at all. She thinks it’s nothing more than the truth, and she’s always faced the truth, his lady knight. She’s brave.

“I did,” he agrees. “But I went back to her because I believed she was carrying my child, and _I was responsible._ I was responsible for the rest, too—even the things I’d have stopped, if I could have, they were my fault as well; she wouldn’t have been able to do them if I hadn’t stood by her so long. It would have been wrong, to leave her to pay a debt that was also mine, on her own.”

He stops, and starts again. Tries to find the words, because he owes this to her, owes her the whole truth, not just the piece of it she’s holding in her white-knuckled hands. “I loved her, yes. As my sister, as the mother of my children. I held her, and I said things that weren’t true, to comfort her, at the end.” He swallows, his mouth gone dry. His heart is pounding, harsh in his ears. “But I didn’t go back to her as a lover. I didn’t—I didn’t kiss her. I didn’t say _I love you_ , not even when the roof was falling in. I couldn’t. Because that wasn’t hers, anymore.” He looks at her then, forces himself to meet her eyes. “It was yours. It will always be yours.” His chest is empty of air.

Her eyes are huge, deep pools of blue, and he thinks he might drown in them, now, but he doesn’t break their shared gaze.

“Brienne,” he says, and he sees the tears start, then, glimmering under her eyes, before they come coursing down her cheeks. She makes no sound, but she doesn’t hide it from him. She holds herself very still, except for her trembling shoulders, and he comes to her slowly, hesitant at first and then growing more certain. He halts, giving her the chance to pull away if she wants to, before reaching a tentative hand to her shoulder, and then folding her into his arms.

She’s stiff and unyielding, at the start, but she lets him hold her, and after a long moment, she starts to sink into his embrace, giving way, and he cradles her against him like she’s made of glass. When she finally rests her forehead on his shoulder, he exhales, ragged, and clamps his mouth shut, before he can say anything stupid, before he can give into the impulse to turn his head, just slightly, and kiss her brow. She’s still weeping, silently, leaking tears like a broken fountain. It’s hard to hold someone who’s taller than him this way, to comfort her, while she’s encased in metal plate. So he releases her, says, “You should rest, let me help,” and starts to unfasten the remaining pieces of her armor, removing them almost impersonally, as if he were her squire. She lets him. He’s careful not to touch her with anything like urgency, like desire. He helps her out of the padded gambeson, too, revealing the thin shirt and fitted hose beneath, and then nudges her gently towards the bed. She moves slowly, as if she’s walking in her sleep, and when she sits, Jaime kneels and pulls off her boots, one after another, then draws the coverlet back, so she can lie down on the soft, worn sheets. He pulls it over her, tucking her in, and touches her shoulder again, his palm lingering on the warmth of her.

Brienne’s eyes are closed, but there are still tears seeping into her pale lashes. “Do you want me to,” he says, and then, “Should I stay?” She nods, not opening her eyes, and Jaime lets out a pent-up breath, and sits down on the edge of the bed to remove his boots and jacket and the wooden hand. He tugs the covers open, and lays himself down beside her. After a moment, she shifts closer, and he exhales again, reaching for her and drawing her to him, letting her tuck her face back into his shoulder, stroking his hand up and down her back, feeling the firm knobs of her spine and the dormant muscles in her shoulders. He holds her while her breath settles, his beard growing damp with his own tears, neither of them speaking a word. He feels like someone has scooped the heart out of his chest and then put it back in again, just a little off-kilter, sore and disorderly, but beating steadily once more. She’s so warm, here in his arms, and before long she’s breathing deep and even, falling asleep. He lets himself kiss the crown of her head, then, just once, her hair soft under his mouth, and closes his eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I did warn you about the crying. 
> 
> Also, the rating increases to M in the next chapter (and will be adjusted accordingly), so steer clear if that's not your jam.


	8. Chapter 8

When Jaime wakes, it’s dark—moonlight polishing the windowsill, and the bedside candle burnt low, almost reduced to a stub. They’d fallen asleep before sunset, and it must be past midnight now. He lies there quietly, watching Brienne. They’ve come apart in their sleep, and her head rests next to his on the pillow, though her arm is still draped around his waist, holding on. She looks younger when she’s sleeping, the lines in her face smoothed away, peaceful. He remembers all the times he’d watched her this way, kept awake by his thoughts, back in Winterfell.

He reaches to brush the hair from her forehead, unthinking, so he can see her face more clearly, and she stirs—like any experienced solider, she’s a light sleeper—and opens her eyes. She smiles when she sees him, sweet and a little unsure, so he cups her chin in his hand, and kisses her gently, mouth closed, stroking his thumb over her hairline. They linger there in silence for what seems like a very long time, watching one another. At some point she starts to kiss him back, soft and then more deeply, and then her hands are on his face, and moving through his hair, and she’s saying _Jaime_ , like it’s a plea, or the answer to one. When she lets go of him and reaches for the hem of his shirt, everything becomes a bit of a blur, clutching and gasping and unlacing, until they’re both bare, stretched out on the rumpled bed, his mouth on the hollow of her throat, her pulse racing under his tongue.

But something’s not quite right, he senses—there’s an odd, subdued tension in her body, and her movements are just a bit too abrupt, her breathing shaky and uneven. She’d been a little awkward and unpracticed, the first time he’d bedded her, but eager despite her inexperience, and deliberate in her actions. Now she seems both hesitant and hasty, by turns. Like a horse that’s been spooked, returning to the scene of the accident. Jaime pulls himself back, gulping for air, and reluctantly lets go of her breast. “Wait,” he says, and when she freezes, uncertain, he reaches for her again, runs a reassuring hand down her arm, catches her wrist and brings it to his lips, so he can kiss her palm, and her long fingers. “We don’t have to rush,” he tells her. “It’s all right, we have time. Just—let me be here with you, for a little while. Talk to me.”

Brienne blinks at him, caught off guard. She draws in an unsteady breath, but he sees the set of her shoulders relax, the strain in her easing. “Tell me about—everything,” he says, tracing her collarbone, feeling the raised lines of the scars there, from the bear's claws. “What it’s been like, here, training the Kingsguard. Sansa, your trip back to Winterfell. News from home. Your father, is he well?” She makes a small, breathless sound, not quite a laugh, but she puts her hand back on his chest. “Yes,” she says, and tells him all about her father’s visit, halfway through her first year as Lord Commander, how good it had been to see him again, how he’d been concerned for her, but also proud. She tells him about knighting Pod, and gets a little teary at the memory, and he kisses her damp eyelids, one after the other, brushing away the wetness with his thumb.

He recounts his brief stay on Halfskull, and his time in Lys, tells her about Arko, makes her laugh when he quotes a few of the man’s more profane sayings. All the while, they’re still touching, small soothing gestures, reacquainting themselves with the maps of one another's skin. He cards his hand through her messy hair, and her fingertips trace out patterns on his chest, tickling as they drift towards his belly. She asks him where he’d been wounded, when the keep fell, and he shows her the jagged scar on his left side, from the sharp corner of a brick, then brings her hand to his ribs and forearm and thigh, each in turn, so she can feel the barely perceptible thickening of the bones where the breaks had healed. She’s somber, taking in the evidence. After a moment, she says, “I missed you,” her voice small and unfamiliar, and his eyes sting at the sound of it.

“I know,” he says. “I know that, now. I’m sorry. I missed you too. So much.” He sighs. “I wish I’d come back sooner, but I wouldn’t have been much use, I suppose, without the year in Lys first. And I—I wasn’t right in the head, then. I found it—difficult, to believe anyone would be better off, with me here.”

“You understand how mistaken you were,” she says to him, quietly, like it’s not really a question, and he nods.

“I do,” he tells her, and it's true, even if he doesn’t feel like he deserves her forgiveness, or Tyrion’s. If they want him back, though, if it makes them happier, it’s enough. That it makes _him_ happy is too much to have asked for, but somehow he is, all the same. It’s not a simple sort of happiness, not when there are still pangs of sorrow and regret gnawing away at him, but it’s real. Brienne’s hand is warm, stroking his cheek, and he smiles at her. “I’ve been very lucky,” he says, his voice cracking a little. “I’ll try not to waste it, this time.”

“What do you want, now?” she asks him.

“To be yours,” he says, the words coming out all in a rush. “To marry you, if you’re willing. If not, to stay by your side, however you’ll have me. I won’t leave you again, not unless you ask me to. You have my word.” It’s a vow, and he means to keep this one, and he thinks that she believes him, or at least she’s willing to try, because she draws his face to hers and kisses him, ferociously. He pulls her close, and realizes that the tension in her body has subsided, now. He lets her steer the course, responding as she deepens their kisses, as her hands move over him more urgently, wringing stuttered gasps from his throat.

When he’s certain where this is heading, sure of her desire, he surrenders to the current, ardent and adrift, sucking marks into the pale skin over her collarbone, hearing her inhale, sharply, as his hand moves between her thighs. He shoves himself downwards, so he can grasp her hip and pull her towards him, and sets his eager mouth to her cunt, tasting her, groaning against her at the sound of her stifled moans. It doesn’t take long, once he adds his fingers too, stroking and curling in the wet, corded heat, before she’s shuddering and clenching around them, and then relaxing, sated and spent. He drops a kiss to her hip, then, smiling against her skin. Brienne tugs him back up, after a moment of lassitude, to kiss him again, and he arches against her when he feels her calloused palm close around his cock. He wants to tell her that this is enough, it’s perfect, but he can’t quite seem to form the syllables, and then she’s pulling him on top of her, and he wants to give her what she wants. She takes him in, and he fucks her desperately, like it’s the last thing he’ll do in this world, and comes embarrassingly soon, collapsing onto her, feeling her strong arms close around him and hold him there, tight.

“ _Gods,_ ” he says, once he's rolled back onto his side, opening his eyes, and feeling sheepish. “Sorry, my lady. It’s been a long time.” Her teeth catch the moonlight, a white flash—the candle’s guttered out, now—as she smiles at him, then rests her forehead against his.

“I don’t mind,” she tells him, her voice fond, and he kisses her again, pulling her close so he can feel her damp and warm all along him, while he catches his breath, toying with her hair.

“I’ll improve,” he promises her, impulsively. “Given the chance to keep on training. Though you’ll have to grant me some latitude—I’m an old man.” He feels the quiet laughter rumble through her chest, and breathes out, pleased that he’s found the right thing—a right thing—to say, that she’s amused by his folly.

She’s quiet for a while, boneless and comfortable in his arms. He’s almost asleep when she speaks again.

“Do you really,” she says, and then, “Are you—sure, about wanting to marry?”

“ _Yes_ ,” Jaime tells her, fervently. He thrills at the idea, actually, the image of her claiming him before the eyes of the world, promising to keep him, always. Then his thoughts run aground on the potential complications. “If—if it won’t keep you from your other vows,” he says, struck by sudden worry. Her duty is precious to her, and he surely has no right to come before it, unless she’s willing to lay it aside of her own accord. He’s not sure he can ask her to make that sacrifice, after everything he’s done.

“Oh,” Brienne says. “No, it’s—that wouldn’t be a problem. Bran didn’t ask us to swear celibacy as members of the Kingsguard. It's just that no one’s chosen to marry, yet. Though there are a few discreet affairs going on,” she adds, as an afterthought. “We’d have to ask for his blessing, but it’s not a formal obstacle.”

Jaime blinks. “How has nobody mentioned _that_ to me before now?” he says, and she laughs.

“Perhaps they didn’t want to make assumptions,” she tells him, and he thinks, _or they didn’t want to remind me why I put on the white cloak, and wore it all those years._ He shakes his head, in wonder, and then glances at Brienne. A few discreet affairs, she’d said.

“Are Pod and Margit—” he starts to ask, and she laughs again.

“Yes,” she tells him. “That is, I’m fairly sure they are. He hasn’t said much about it, but he’s not very good at hiding things.”

“Ah. I’d wondered,” he tells her. “Is it serious?”

“I’m not certain,” she says, a line creasing her brow as she contemplates the question. “I don’t think it’s just a dalliance on his part, though.”

“Hmm,” Jaime says. “Good thing he’s got a strong suit of armor,” and she snorts and thumps him on the arm.

“I _like_ Margit,” she informs him. “She keeps you in line.”

“I like her too,” he admits, because he does. He just knows better than to say it to her face.

He presses a kiss to Brienne’s shoulder. “Enough talk about our wayward assistants,” he says, then, and savors the feeling of her smiling into his hair. It’s enough talk of any kind, for now.

When he wakes again, she’s still smiling at him, warm in the morning sunlight, and his heart trips over at the sight. She even manages to tease him a little, yawning, as he gathers his rumpled clothes and pulls them back on, grimacing at the prospect of the awkward walk back out of the tower. Pod’s going to notice, for sure. Maybe the rest of them too. Tyrion’s going to be completely insufferable, and Bronn’s going to be even fucking worse. But he can’t bring himself to mind, not really, not with her pink-cheeked and glad-eyed in front of him.

“No one will comment,” she assures him.

“Speak for your own men,” he replies, grinning. “I’m going to get an earful, that's certain. And we’ll both be getting it once I dare show my face at a council meeting.”

She blushes, then, which delights him. “The sewers aren’t on the agenda for the next one,” she says, “thank _gods._ ”

“Maybe we can delay my next report until we’ve announced the betrothal,” he tells her, and she bites her lip, her color high, her eyes darting around the room. He reins himself in.

“Not until you’re ready,” he says, softly, coming to her and resting his hand on her arm. “Not unless you’re ready at all.” He thinks they’ve rebuilt something overnight, here, miraculously, but he wants to give it time, and ample reinforcement, be sure that it will hold.

Brienne nods, looking both pleased and relieved. “I’ll speak to the King, though. Make sure he holds no objection,” she says, and Jaime smiles. He kisses her again before leaving, warmed by her answering smile, and ducks quickly past the door of the common room before he can see who’s inside; and he tries not to whistle, exultant, as he crosses the sunlit yard.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some smut and fluff, to leaven all that angst! This is the last full chapter; the next one's a shortish epilogue, and then there will be a pastiche-style afterword of sorts. Both should be posted within another day or two, because clearly I'd rather write about these fools than the stuff I'm supposed to be writing about.


	9. Chapter 9

_One year later_

The night before the reservoir is finally ready to be filled, Jaime finds himself restless, struck with something akin to the jittery anticipation he’d always felt on the eve of a battle. He keeps checking and re-checking the plans and the steps of the procedure, long after Margit has thrown up her hands and abandoned him to go find a drink, or Pod, or both. So it’s late, close to midnight, when he heads back to the White Sword Tower and makes his way to his quarters. _Their quarters._ The quarters assigned to the Lord Commander, which had once been his, and are now his wife’s, and therefore his again to share. It’s still strange, that feeling, to have lived two different lives within the same walls. Tyrion’s repeatedly offered them more spacious lodgings in the rebuilt holdfast, and Brienne has repeatedly demurred. They’re both busy elsewhere during daytime—him in the office or out at the worksites, her in the council chambers and training yard, or at the king’s side—and at night, they prefer to keep close. This is all the room they need.

They’d wed almost eleven months ago, a small, simple ceremony in the keep’s private sept. Jaime had worried, at the time, that it might be too soon: Brienne was still a little wary, then, her trust in him still mending—but she’d wanted it anyway, and he’d wanted it too, and also it had been getting damned inconvenient to be creeping back and forth between towers more nights than not. He’s glad, now, that they’d taken the leap: it had steadied them both, making those vows before witnesses, bringing the bond they were rebuilding into the light. He’d already made his real vows, alone in the quiet privacy of her bed—but the formal, public ones had turned out to matter to him too, more than he would have guessed.

She’s not there, when he comes in, but the evidence of her recent presence is apparent: the armor hung, already polished, on its stand, Oathkeeper resting in its scabbard on the table. He’d heard voices down the corridor; she must be in the common room, talking to Pod or another of her deputies, or reviewing the duty rota for Kingsguard. Jaime goes to the alcove that holds the wardrobe and their bed, and sits on the wooden chest at its foot to unbuckle the false hand and unlace his boots. He’s got the first one off and is working at a knot in the second when he hears the door open.

He looks up to smile at Brienne as she enters, and smiles again when she bends to drop a kiss to the top of his head, running her fingers through his hair, before going to the wardrobe to divest herself of her rumpled shirt and hose. A part of him still thrills at every casual, proprietary gesture of affection. It had taken months for her to touch him that way—out of bed, routinely, without any echo of self-consciousness—even after they were married. He returns the favor as often as she’ll permit him, which is rarely, in front of others, and constantly, when they’re alone.

Brienne pulls a nightshirt over her head, yawning, as he finally triumphs over the bootlaces and moves on to the ties of his breeches. “You look exhausted,” she observes, watching him. “You’ve been keeping longer hours than anyone else in this city, lately.”

“Don’t worry,” he tells her, “you’ll reclaim that honor soon enough,” and she rolls her eyes, even though it’s no more than the truth.

“Unless the sluicegates fail again,” he adds. “Or the siphons. Or we find out that we miscalculated the flow from the aqueduct, or another foreman gets drunk and falls into a fucking holding tank, it’s a bloody miracle that fool survived—” He pauses to pull his shirt off, but before he can resume the litany of complaint, he feels Brienne’s strong hands settle on his shoulders, warm and calloused on the bare skin. She chuckles at his muffled groan of relief, and starts to knead the tense, aching muscles, gentle at first and then more firm. Jaime closes his eyes and tips his head forward, giving way. He’d been the one to start this, made a habit of rubbing her tired back or sore feet after a long day of training or drilling or, blessedly rarely amid the still-holding peace, fighting—but she’d turned the tables before long, and she’s better at it, given the unfair advantage of two hands. He groans again, in release and pleasure, as the sinews finally unknot themselves under her sturdy fingers, relaxing into weary contentment.

“Better?” she asks, her voice low and amused, the way it sounds when her mouth is curving up, smiling. Her smiles come more freely these days; he tries to mark and savor every one.

“You’ve gotten astonishingly good at shutting me up,” he tells her, turning his head to kiss her knuckles. “I do hope it makes me a more tolerable bedmate.”

Brienne laughs, a sound almost as good as her touch, and releases him with a gentle shove. “Come to bed,” she tells him, and he strips off his breeches and obeys, not bothering to fetch his nightshirt. He considers, briefly, persuading her out of her own—the sheets still smell faintly of what they’d been doing here at dawn—but he’s very tired indeed. Alas. So he settles for a lingering kiss, before turning on his side so she can curl around him, warm and solid against his back. There’s not a day that goes by that he doesn’t marvel at the wonder of it: a love that he doesn’t have to hide; the right to fall asleep in her arms, untroubled, and wake beside her each morning. It’s been slow, patient work, and not always easy, dismantling old misunderstandings and unspoken fears, but they’re solid, now, the foundation strong. There are no words sufficient to his gratitude. “Thank you,” he mumbles into the pillow, and feels her lips brush the nape of his neck in reply. “Go to sleep,” she murmurs. “I’m sure it will all go well, tomorrow.”

And so it does. Just before noon, he climbs down the narrow stair to make one last check of the subterranean chamber, his footsteps echoing in the empty space, and then he goes back up to the surface and gives the signal, and the water starts to flow. It will take almost two days for it to fill to capacity, if Margit’s calculations are correct, and there’s not much to do in the meantime but wait. But he stays for hours, watching the water inch up along the stone columns, the reflections making rippled patterns on the brick arches of the ceiling. At Tyrion’s suggestion, they’d harvested most of the columns and a fair amount of the brick from the ruins, repurposed the remnants to build this hollow heart now pumping beneath the city. It gives the space a strange, patchwork appearance: the rows orderly and uniform from a distance, but all the parts mismatched and distinct when seen close, in the torchlight.

Margit comes down to check on the progress at intervals, but mostly Jaime’s alone, sitting on the catwalk and watching the water rise, something inside him flooding in tandem with its patient flow. As the hours pass, he closes his eyes and says his goodbyes, one by one: first Joffrey, damn his firstborn for being a vicious little fool, and himself for still caring; and then Tywin, damn him too, though some part of Jaime misses him all the same; and oh, Myrcella, sweet and golden—the remembered sensation of her slight body in his arms, her hair curling soft under his chin, her last breaths—and poor, gentle Tommen. Last of all, Cersei, and the unnamed babe who never drew breath or saw daylight, who maybe never existed, at least not long enough to be saved. He still has no idea what became of his sister’s body; if Tyrion knows, he’s never said, and Jaime’s never asked. Burned, most likely. But it’s possible that some fragments found their way here too, a handful of ashes drifting to rest in the ruins. There will be no marble crypt for his family, no carved faces in stone: this damp, hidden place is their tomb. And from it, life will spring forth again; a city will be green and thriving, one day. He doesn’t weep—the time for that is past, now—but his chest swells, filling up like the cavernous space before him, until it’s tight and painful, and he drags in a deep breath, and it eases. He opens his eyes, then, standing, and bows his head for a moment, before he turns and walks back to the stair, and up into the light.

“There you are,” says Margit, when he appears. “I was starting to think we were going to have to fish you out of the water again. All well?”

“All well,” he tells her. “Proceeding according to forecast, as far as I can see. I’m going up to the keep to report to the crown; I’ll leave you to keep an eye on things. Don’t let Govan or Tyros anywhere near the siphon, unless you want to fish _them_ out. Might as well get the practice in now.”

She makes a face and waves him off, heading in the direction of the distant foremen. In another three days (if no trouble arises in the meantime) he’ll be leaving it all in her hands, when he takes ship. They’re sailing to Evenfall, a much-postponed journey, so Brienne can spend a fortnight visiting home, and Jaime can finally meet his father-in-law. Lord Selwyn had sent his blessing by raven before the wedding—presumably a sign that the man knows his daughter too well to try to dissuade her from any folly she’s determined to pursue—but there hadn’t been time for him to make it to King’s Landing to attend. The Evenstar has been as busy on Tarth as they have here, lately—the isle’s quarries are hard at work supplying stone for the reconstruction, and pirates have been taking advantage of the vacuum left by the destruction of the Greyjoy fleet. Jaime is somewhat anxious about the prospect of meeting the man, but he’s looking forward to seeing Tarth properly this time, and even more so to spending a week aboard ship with no distractions to keep him from his wife's company.

Podrick is on guard duty this evening, and ushers him in. Jaime is still unnerved in Brandon Stark’s presence, but it’s gotten easier with time. He makes his report, explaining that everything is proceeding according to plan.

“Thank you, Ser Jaime,” is all the King says in response. Jaime's about to take his leave, but this time he can’t stop himself from turning back to ask the question.

“Why me?” he asks. “You could have imported a master aquificer from any city in Essos. I’ve done nothing they couldn’t have done faster, and just as well. Better, probably.”

Bran’s eyes are focused on him, fully and rarely present. “You once killed a king to keep this city from burning,” he says.

Jaime’s throat feels tight, momentarily deprived of air. The King says it as matter-of-factly as if he’d been there himself, as if he’d _seen_ —and Jaime realizes, then, that he _has_ , that he’s witnessed it all—this strange king with his inhuman eyes, who sits there wearing the body of a young man, only three or four years older than that stupid, heartsick boy in his white cloak, the hem soaked with royal blood.

“And it still burned,” he says, when his breath comes back, bitterness leaking into his voice. He’d only postponed the disaster—saved some years, perhaps, but not many lives, in the end.

“There’s more than one way to save a city,” says the King. Jaime just stares at him, wordless.

“Tell Ser Podrick to come in,” the King says, dismissing him, his gaze seeking the distance again. “And when you return, you can start on the fountains.”

“Yes, Your Grace,” Jaime replies, and goes, his limbs feeling heavy and his head light.

Tyrion catches him in the corridor, looking upbeat. “No trouble so far, I take it?”

“No,” Jaime says, a little slowly. He repeats his report for Tyrion, glossing over the details, and says nothing about his conversation with the king. “Margit will keep you updated while I’m gone,” he says, at the end. “If anything does come up, let her handle it first; she’ll do fine.”

“Glad to hear it,” says Tyrion. “If your good-father shoves you off a cliff, at least we’ll have someone competent to take over.”

Jaime glares at him, but can’t quite keep a wry smile from his mouth. “I really don’t plan on giving him cause.”

“How things change,” Tyrion comments, as if he's narrating for some unseen audience. But he grins, then, and drops the teasing. “Oh, and bring back more marble, if you can, as much as the hold will carry. We’re running low again, with the Guildhall work picking up. I’ll wring the coin for it out of Bronn before you leave.”

“I’m not your errand-boy,” he tells his brother. “But I’ll see what I can do. I may have some use for it myself.”

“Oh, will you? Well, get me enough for the godsdamned Guildhall, and you can keep the rest,” Tyrion says, with a chuckle. “At this rate, the Lannister name may someday be as famed for building this city as for destroying it.” He flashes a grin in Jaime’s direction, and heads for the stair, whistling under his breath.

Jaime makes his way across the courtyard, heading for the tower, but he’s surprised halfway when Brienne pops out of the door to the armory, comfortable in an unassuming blue tunic, her hair damp with exertion—she’s been sparring, he thinks, with a wooden sword, and with no armor. She looks tired, and happy, and there will be faint bruises blooming over her pale skin by nightfall.

She smiles when she sees him. “I didn’t realize you were back already,” she says. “I just told Hendrek to take the next watch; I meant to come down and see your reservoir before supper.”

“I’ll show you tomorrow,” he promises, the lingering weight of the king’s words evaporating at the sight of her. “It’s going well. No reason to think we’ll have to delay the voyage. Again.”

“I’m happy to hear it,” she says, her eyes warm, their blue washing over him like a wave.

Jaime steals a kiss, then, and she lets him, even though they’re standing out in the open. He breathes in the smell of her, skin and sweat and sawdust, all familiar and dear. He draws back and grins up at his wife. “I’m going to build you a fountain,” he tells her. “I’ll tell you all about it, over supper.”

Brienne laughs. “A bath, first, I think,” she says, brimming with amusement, and reaches for his hand. “Care to join me?” she asks. And so he does.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was supposed to be a short epilogue, and then it very rudely demanded to be a whole chapter instead, at the worst possible time given my other current obligations. Hence the long delay. The last bit is already written, and will be edited and posted shortly.
> 
> Oh, also: the design of the reservoir, including the use of salvaged columns, is loosely based on the Basilica and Philoxenos (now known as Yerebatan and Binbirdirek) cisterns of Byzantine Constantinople. If you're ever in Istanbul, go check them out; you won't regret it.


	10. Chapter 10

An excerpt from Alys Tarly-Redwyne, _Dynastic Cultivation: Urban Political Ecology in Middle-Period Westeros_ (Oldtown: Oldtown University Press, 1306, pp. 56-57)

...the most significant turning-point in this period was the reconstruction of King’s Landing after its destruction by “dragonfire” (scholars differ on the actual cause) during the attempted Targaryen Restoration. While the capital previously possessed limited water and sewer infrastructure, most notably the fountains constructed under Queen Alysanne Targaryen’s patronage in the mid-first century AC (see Crabb 1292 and Penrose 1301), these systems were hardly adequate to meet the needs of the its growing population, which reached an estimated half million or more during the brief interval of Baratheon rule. The postwar damage to the urban fabric provided a unique opportunity for innovation, and the reign of King Brandon (Stark) the Greenseer saw an unprecedented number of public works projects, which led to dramatic changes in the city’s built environment, and subsequently, its ecosystem. Among these was an extensive system for water supply and drainage, including aqueducts, reservoirs, sewer channels, and fountains, most of which were constructed during the first decade or two of the Stark era. A number of its features bear a striking and suggestive resemblance to the Essosi iedarka (from High Valyrian _iēdar_ , “water”) systems of the first through third centuries AC, most notably the examples of Volantis and Lys (Mopatis 1302). It is unknown whether foreign experts were recruited to help design the system, or the contemporary elite of the Stark court drew inspiration from their personal experience of Essos. Several sources suggest that Lord Tyrion Lannister, the first Hand to Brandon the Greenseer, spent some time in exile on the continent, and of course the extensive travels of the king’s sister Arya the Explorer are well-attested in the documentary record (Frey 1276; Umber 1298). This hybrid Essosi-Westerosi aqua-infrastructure transformed King’s Landing into an early example of a Westerosi garden city, and within roughly a century of the city’s rebuilding, previously endangered species like the flametree (archaic name: weirwood) began to re-establish themselves within the urban environments of the Crownlands.

While the origins of the system may be lost to history, most contemporary sources indicate that Jaime Lannister, also known as Jaime the Fountbuilder, played a key role in its development. A few earlier records apply the epithet Kingslayer to a man of the same name; while some scholars have suggested this is another historical personage entirely (Rivers 1272), the evidence for that theory is weak, as multiple sources from the period clearly indicate that the man known as Kingslayer was a brother of both Tyrion Lannister the Hand and the Queen-Pretender Cersei Lannister-Baratheon, possibly the latter’s twin (see Winterfell Archives, folio 7:02 for one example). It remains unclear where Jaime the Fountbuilder learned his profession, but he oversaw the construction of both the Greenseer Aqueduct and the Great Reservoir during the first decade of the fourth century, and inscriptions bearing his name can be found on a number of other public works dating to the 310s, most notably the Evenstar Fountain. It is also noteworthy that many of these projects originated in the same period during which we see the first recorded references to women aquificers in Westeros, an early indication of what would later become an unusually female-dominated profession by the standards of the time. Some scholars (Sand and Westerling, 1300) argue that this trend may have been influenced by the Fountbuilder’s marriage to the far better-known historical figure Brienne of Tarth (later Brienne Evenstar), although the documentary evidence remains limited. However, it is widely agreed that her example as a renowned female knight, and Lord Commander of the Kingsguard in the early years of Brandon Stark’s reign, had a significant impact on the destabilization of occupational gender norms in Middle Period Westeros (Martell 1304). There are also intriguing parallels to the emergent Northern dynamics of the same era….

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry, I couldn't resist a bit of academic pastiche! If you made it to the end, thank you for putting up with this bizarre premise for a love story, and I hope you enjoyed all the waterworks. 
> 
> Also, urban infrastructure is important and fascinating and you and the people who govern you should care about it, because there really is more than one way to save a city.
> 
> (p.s. if you actually did like the waterworks, I'm [on tumblr](https://kiraziwrites.tumblr.com), so stay tuned for some photos of those cisterns and so forth. There is now at least one [bonus scene](https://kiraziwrites.tumblr.com/post/186748744212/so-the-other-day-someone-asked-shipping-receiving) posted there.) 
> 
> The Louise Glück poem from which I borrowed the title, and a few other echoes besides:
> 
> **The Wild Iris**
> 
> At the end of my suffering  
> there was a door.
> 
> Hear me out: that which you call death  
> I remember.
> 
> Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.  
> Then nothing. The weak sun  
> flickered over the dry surface.
> 
> It is terrible to survive  
> as consciousness  
> buried in the dark earth.
> 
> Then it was over: that which you fear, being  
> a soul and unable  
> to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth  
> bending a little. And what I took to be  
> birds darting in low shrubs.
> 
> You who do not remember  
> passage from the other world  
> I tell you I could speak again: whatever  
> returns from oblivion returns  
> to find a voice:  
> from the center of my life came  
> a great fountain, deep blue  
> shadows on azure sea water.


End file.
